Ever Deepening

Priorities

Our modern age is an age of science. Despite the
nobility of science as an endeavor, to a degree that will only become
clear later, this age of science has culminated in an era of spiritual
violation. This is not the fault of the scientific process. Science is
simply an application of respectful rational inquiry to convert magical
thought into understanding. Our spiritual difficulties are a consequence
of the order of priorities faced by our forebears.

To anyone who has faced the force of a natural
disaster, it is obvious that life is a fragile gift. For various reasons,
our urge to master the management of energy requires that we commit
ourselves to the preservation of life. First, each person is a chance to
achieve mastery. In some sense, they are an experiment. Unplanned
interruptions of an experiment limit the understanding that can be gained
from it. Secondly, we are Lamarckian creatures: we benefit to the degree
that we share our journey. Disrupting that participation robs us of the
chance to accomplish our goals.

Obviously, there is much to respect and admire
in primitive cultures. In many cases, they manifest a lost balance with
the earth that sustains us. But they were fragile, precisely because they
could not reliably manage the natural tyrannies. The elements,
disease, hunger, and predation were all terrifying and imminent realities
that have faded dramatically in the consciousness of advanced
cultures.

It is hard to argue that magical thinking did
not play a significant part in how ancient peoples responded to the
natural tyrannies. We know that sacrifices of wealth and life to
propitiate the gods were a normal practice by ancient peoples. The
diversity of the pantheons among ancient cultures would lead us to
conclude that whatever basis those practices may have had in reality, the
implementing mechanisms were not understood clearly by the practitioners.
One significant problem, perhaps the overwhelming one, was the
difficulty of training competent practitioners and channeling their
intentions. Consequently, their activities produced unreliable
results.